Peter Doherty was born in 1940 in Brisbane. After attending veterinary school at the University of Queensland and completing his PhD at the University of Ediburgh, he took up a post-doctoral position with the John Curtin School of Medicine Research. He made a breakthrough in discovering the role of T cells in the immune system, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Medicine and was named Australian of the Year.

The thought of writing to my 13-year-old self takes me back to 1953, the year I finished 8th grade in a Queensland state primary school and, a few months later, joined the first intake at Indooroopilly High School.

That meant catching the commuter steam train, then walking to this brand-new school on the hill. Back then, two things I would not have to tell that freckled, skinny kid would be ‘Don’t touch drugs’ and ‘Be careful of social media, it can waste your life!’ Neither was on the horizon.

A regret is that I didn’t talk more with the WWII refugee kids who were still flooding into Australia. The expectation was that they should become like us, not that we could learn from them. In fact, that’s the main suggestion I’d make to my high school self today: interact with a much greater diversity of people and get a better understanding of different lives. Talking helps with your own choices. Life improves when we are less ‘self’ and more ‘other’ focused. With the really big issues like climate change, ‘think globally, act locally’.

Raised by financially stretched parents (‘frugals’ who suffered the 1930s Depression) I didn’t need a whole lot of advice about application and self-discipline. My imperative was to ‘get the hell out of Dodge City’, in this case a working-class outer suburb of Brisbane. Cheap paperbacks by (predominantly) European intellectuals and committed high-school teachers specialised in the sciences, arts and mathematics showed a way forward. That left me convinced that our socially diverse, immigrant country will only achieve its potential if all can access a quality education. That needn’t include luxuries like overseas trips, but it does require great, well-paid and respected teachers.

If that 13-year-old were starting out today, I’d point to the advice I attribute to Dame Elisabeth Murdoch, who lived a full life to age 103: do everything the hard way, walk don’t ride, take the stairs not the lift. Being happy is good, but we all experience unhappiness and, in fact, learn more from painful failure than from easy success. Just accept that as reality. Disneyland is fantasy, not life! Don’t agonise, and forget any ‘blame game’. That gets you nowhere.

At 13, we’ve got just about everything ahead of us. If I’d had better advice and more sophisticated parents, even older kids at high school to talk to, I would probably have done something quite different with my life, maybe in the area of writing or language. The consequence is, though, that I would not have won a Nobel Prize and I would now be a very different person. And, the absence of a senior group at school may (together with an early exposure to Protestant non-conformism) be why I’ve never had any problem in either ignoring peer pressure or in identifying authoritarians and bullies for who they are. Don’t accept mindless conformism: do your own thing, look at the evidence and think for yourself. And when you get to that age, exercise your precious right to vote.

A couple of thoughts from Hamlet: ‘Above all to thine own self be true’ and ‘We know what we are but know not what we may become’. Add to that: ‘Showing up is half the battle.’ Hang in there, learn as much as you can and seize opportunities when they’re offered. Providing you make the effort and avoid doing major harm to yourself and to others, there’s a good possibility that your experiences (both positive and negative) at age 13 and in the school years that follow will point to an interesting way forward. If that doesn’t work, then any decent university offers a whole range of new and exciting options. Life is for the long haul. Delight in challenges, keep your mind open, and don’t expect anything worthwhile to be easy!

Peter C Doherty,

University of Melbourne, 7 February 2016